PART SEVEN:
A Discussion With Dr. Tom Van Flandern

contd......

When the Viking spacecraft saw an apparent face on Mars in the Cydonia region, that was interesting but could easily have been a “trick of light and shadow”. So scientists formulated tests to tell whether the object was natural (a product of geology and illusion) or artificial (a product of intelligences). The first eight such tests initially gave a split decision, 5 to 3 in favor of artificiality. Two of those tests were based on the fact that the Cydonia face-object cannot be seen from the ground but must be viewed from above, for example from an orbiting space station. So if artificial, it would logically be built on the equator of Mars and built upright. But the Cydonia face was far from the equator (latitude 41 degrees north) and was tilted from upright by an angle of about 35 degrees. Those statistics favored a natural origin. Then in 1996 we took a look at the pole shift of Mars to see where the face-like object was before the pole shift. The answer was exactly on the old equator and upright to within two degrees! The odds against that happening by chance were roughly 1000-to-one. So if the builders were active before the cataclysm that tipped the pole of Mars (the explosion of the other moon 3.2 million years ago), then both these tests indicated an artificial origin. By the end of that year, all eight tests favored an artificial origin over a natural one.

As compelling as this conclusion was to any mind open to either possibility, it still needed conformation. So in 1997, the Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR), an association of about 30 independent scientists, sent a few representatives to NASA to request priority imaging of the Cydonia face-like object by the high-resolution camera on the newly-arrived Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. SPSR then set down criteria for distinguishing artificial from natural well before any results were known. In brief, if and only if the object was artificial, the impression of a humanoid eye, nose, and mouth in the original images should be supplemented by secondary facial features in any detailed new image. These specifically included an eyebrow over the eye socket, an iris inside the eye socket, nostrils at the large end of a tapered nose, and evidence of lips in the mouth feature. Specifics were set down for the qualifying size, shape, location, and orientation of these features on the mesa. Moreover, the test required that no qualifying features appear in the background so that our minds could form apparent facial features from randomness, as our minds are prone to do.

When the spacecraft images were returned to Earth in April 1998, every prediction was fulfilled. This was like predicting a deal of 13 spades in advance, except that the combined odds against this happening by chance at Cydonia were 1000-billion-billion-to-one. That left no doubt in the minds of scientists familiar with the a priori principle that the Cydonia Face had to be an artificial structure.

HORN: Can you give another example of ruling out a natural origin for some of these artistic features?

VAN FLANDERN: Yes. One of the animal shapes elsewhere on Mars resembled a puma, but it wasn’t detailed enough to be persuasive and the edge of the spacecraft photograph left the hindquarters cut off and unseen. So the scientist who found the image, J.P. Levasseur, predicted that the image was artificial if and only if the missing hindquarters completed an animal hind-section and legs and contained a puma-like tail extending from the right place on the hindquarters. Anything else from an unlimited number of possibilities would indicate a natural origin. A few years later, the spacecraft (by request) took another image that included the hindquarters area, and showed the completion of an animal hindquarters and hind legs and a marvelous tail of the right proportions extending from just the right place.

HORN: So what is the connection between possible artifacts on Mars and the exploded planet hypothesis we were discussing earlier?

VAN FLANDERN: The explosion of the “water-world” body Mars was orbiting until 3.2 million years ago produced the most recent pole shift on Mars that moved the Cydonia Face from the equator to its present location, tilting it by 35 degrees. This tells us that the builders of these amazing surface features predated the explosion, and that their civilization was probably terminated by that explosion.

Moreover, we see no evidence of a primary civilization on Mars, making the exploded water world the most likely location for that civilization. Indeed, that speculation makes sense on several levels. For example, if we project our own civilization ahead a few thousand years, trips to our Moon will by then be routine for tourists. The first thing such tourists will wish to do is board an orbiting space station to get a close-up overview of the entire Moon. It will then be a natural step for the many activities on the lunar surface – telescopes, mining operations, laboratories, communication centers, and all manner of commercial operations – to attract tourists and tourist dollars by building surface exhibits that can be seen from the orbiting space station. So we can reasonably project that the future of our Moon will be not unlike what we are seeing today on Mars – surface exhibits that can be best viewed from an orbiting space station. However, if that was the function of the artistic Mars images, that would imply Mars was the civilization’s moon, not its home world. And the latter was lost by explosion 3.2 million years ago – a date that is reliably determined from the orbital period of new comet orbits.

HORN: What is the significance of that connection for us here on Earth?

VAN FLANDERN: We are deep into the area of speculation now. However, it seems unlikely to be coincidence that the geoglyphs on Mars are so humanoid and terrestrial in appearance rather than alien. And it seems also unlikely to be coincidence that the builder’s civilization on their home world ended about the same time as the dating of the earliest humanoid fossil on Earth, the “Lucy” find in Africa. Both are dated to 3.2 million years ago. So it seems that one civilization was ending about the same time that another was beginning. When these findings are tied in with the most ancient “sacred” writings from cultures everywhere on Earth, the mind is compelled to wonder if those stories are perhaps preserving knowledge of human origins elsewhere in the solar system, and of a species transfer to Earth in an effort to survive the cataclysm. Answering such questions may in the end turn out to be the most important knowledge for our species to acquire in our future as solar system explorers, more important even than the Copernican revolution when we learned that Earth was not the center of the universe.

HORN: We will need to do a part two at some point to focus more on the question of origins. Some of this sounds almost like a Star Trek episode where extraterrestrial civilizations need to escape their doomed planet in order to find a new home elsewhere. Yet doesn't modern physics still hold that nothing can travel faster than light (186 thousand miles per second), so that touring the Galaxy in a human lifetime (as in "Star Trek") is impossible. Is that theory still valid?

VAN FLANDERN: No, it is not. The geometric interpretation of Einstein’s general relativity theory appeared to require that the speed of light was an absolute upper speed limit. However, evidence has gone against the geometric interpretation in favor of the field interpretation favored by Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, to mention just a few of the great physicists of the 20th century who weighed in on the matter. In the field interpretation, gravity is a classical force that propagates from a source mass to a target body. For example, the force of the Sun’s gravity holds Earth in orbit. All six modern experiments that attempt to measure the speed of gravitational force propagation show that it must greatly exceed the speed of light. From that, we can now be sure that the speed of light is not a limiting speed in the universe. So once our technology discovers “gravitons” and masters controlling them, we will not only be able to listen in on any Galactic conversations that may be occurring, but we will also be able to travel about the Galaxy within human life-spans.

HORN: Have scientists observed phenomenon propagating faster than light?

VAN FLANDERN: Yes, the strongest of the six experiments places a lower limit to the speed of gravity of 20 billion times faster than the speed of light. It also follows that the speed of electric (Coulomb) force is faster than light, and might be as fast as the speed of gravity. Light waves (sometimes confusingly called “electromagnetic waves”) and gravitational waves (which have no more to do with gravity than light has to do with electricity) travel at the speed of light.

HORN: Is gravity a "push" or a "pull"? And what does this tell us about the origin and nature of gravity?

VAN FLANDERN: Traditionally, we have always thought of gravity as something within the Earth and all masses that pull us and other things toward themselves. But we now have a new understanding of the nature and origin of gravity that is quite different. We think the visible universe is filled with innumerable, super-fast “gravitons” traveling in all directions, individually so tiny that they can usually fly through the atoms composing the entire Earth without hitting anything solid. But a small fraction of them does hit solid matter and gets scattered or absorbed.

For us standing here on Earth’s surface, we are not held down by anything from the Earth but by a graviton wind from space pushing us downward. That wind arrives from all directions. But the Earth blocks a small part of the wind trying to reach us from below. So more gravitons strike us from above than from below, and we feel a net push downward. This is known as the theory of “pushing gravity”. It predicts five new properties of gravity, and so far these predictions are in good accord with all observations and experiments. Pushing gravity is also the subject of a 20-author book by that title published in 2002.

HORN: How fast does gravity propagate?

VAN FLANDERN: The experimental lower limit for the speed of gravity is 20 billion times faster than light. Light takes 8.3 minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the Sun to Earth, but a graviton would make the same trip in under 25 nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Light takes about 30,000 years to travel from the center of our Galaxy to our location, but a graviton would make that trip in under a minute. Light from the most distant galaxies we can see takes billions of years to get here, but gravitons would take less than one year.

HORN: Are these new ideas speculative, or are they now published and accepted?

VAN FLANDERN: “Accepted” is always a slow process. Physicist Max Planck once said “Science progresses one funeral at a time”, and that adage remains just as true today. The best new ideas can accomplish in the short term is to expose themselves to peer review and the toughest arguments opponents can muster. If they survive that, get published, and silence the critics, the rest is just a matter of time for the word to spread and the resistance to die out.

The gravity papers were first published in 1996, then more aggressively in 1999 in Physics Letters A. A few challenge papers appeared, and all were rebutted. Then in 2002 I was joined by a senior physicist, the late J.P. Vigier (in whose honor four international symposiums have been held). We jointly published a comprehensive, 38-page paper in “Foundations of Physics” setting out the full story, including every challenge raised and how it is answered. There has been no further scientific criticism since that review paper appeared.

HORN: What are the practical implications of faster-than-light travel for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and interstellar communications?

VAN FLANDERN: Assuming gravitons exist and propagate billions of times faster than light, no advanced civilization in the Galaxy would be using radio waves to communicate because it takes too long (longer than normal life-spans). So under those assumptions, our SETI program is a waste of time. Only when we can listen in to graviton signals will we start to hear the Galactic conversations that may be going on, and achieve direct communication with any stellar neighbors we might have.

HORN: What about the implications for UFOs and interstellar travel?

VAN FLANDERN: The same principles apply. To get around the Galaxy, one would need to use graviton propulsion systems. That is still far enough ahead of our civilization’s progress that it would appear magical to us. Extraterrestrials and their vehicles could come and go without attracting our attention if they chose to do so. Many UFO reports don’t register on my personal plausibility meter because they envision vehicles that are barely more advanced than the most modern human flying craft, and are so klutzy that they are frequently rumored to crash.

HORN: The Roswell Incident. What do you think happened there in 1947?

VAN FLANDERN: I have never personally investigated that incident. But from the reports on both sides of the controversy I have seen, I think criticisms of the classified Mogul balloon explanation have seemed insubstantial, being based more on a distrust of government sources than on verifiable facts.

HORN: Will you be in Roswell this July? If so, will you be making a public appearance?

VAN FLANDERN: No. The charter of my sponsoring organization, Meta Research, covers everything from “40 km and up”, so UFOs usually remain a bit out of my field as a professional astronomer. But occasionally they do come within it. I did investigate the reported anomalous object photographed by the Russian Phobos 2 spacecraft, and I investigated the alleged UFO sightings over Mexico during the 1991 total solar eclipse because I was there for the eclipse. Neither of those incidents turned out to involve genuine UFOs. Regrettably, the UFO field, always in need of support and supporters, is not as eager to publish explanations of famous cases as it is to publish unexplained aerial phenomena, which in turn hurts the field’s credibility with serious-but-open-minded scientists.

HORN: There is so much more I could ask you, which will have to wait for that part-two if we do it. Please tell people where they can learn more about you and your research.

VAN FLANDERN: Visit our web site at http://meatresearch.org for extensive samples of our research and articles. My book, Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets gives a nice overview of our Meta Science from the solar system to the whole universe, including why the Big Bang theory is wrong and the best bet to replace it. For the latest developments, our quarterly publication, the Meta Research Bulletin, has just gone electronic and open source to begin its 16th year as the publication with the best track record for successful predictions in the field of astronomy. We also offer a number of CDs with presentation materials and technical details about “Gravity”, “The Evolving Mars Story”, and “A Short Tour of the Universe”. See our web site store for more information about these items and a few books we recommend.

HORN: Thank you for taking time to be part of the special Road to Roswell series.

Some of the speakers at this year's Roswell festivities include Col. Jesse Marcel Jr, Dennis Balthaser, Greg Bishop, Donald Burleson, PhD, Stephen Bassett, Richard Dolan, Adam GoRightly, Stanton Friedman, John Greenewald, Paola Harris, Michael S. Heiser PhD, Tom Horn, Dr. Roger Leir, Guy Malone, Nicholas Redfern, John Rhodes, Peter Robbins, Rob Simone, and many more.

Learn more about the 60th Anniversary Roswell Festivals see both websites: http://www.roswellufofestival.com
http://www.roswellufomuseum.com/festival.htm

< Part One | < Part Two | < Part Three | < Part Four | < Part Five | < Part Six | Part Seven >

Copyright © 2007 - A FarShores thanks to author Tom Horn
of Raiders News Network for forwarding this article.

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